Imagine London is still as quaint as ever. Last time there, up by the St Pancras station, some dicey characters were yelling about pickpockets, which is a great way to get people to feel for their wallets and flag the easy pickings for... pickpockets.

If I go back, could use some advice on the appropriate response to Bolivian panpipe buskers who refuse to leave your train car.

An idea I had originally wanted to use for an "art tour for the blind" project that I probably won't ever get a chance to do but thought I would throw it out there as it might have a more general useful application, particularly to BMORG. Think of it as auditory GPS, it could be used as an emergency navigation tool in severe prolonged whiteout conditions to provide a way to navigate to a known reference point and from there find your way home.

The way it works is, so imagine you have a sound emitter at 5 o'clock and one at 4 o'clock and one down the 6 o'clock radial the same distance as the 4 and 5 emitters are from the desired reference point (say, behind the Cafe). Now imagine we have a severe whiteout condition that might continue for several hours and there are people stranded out on the deep playa. The three sound emitters would sound a "chirp" at exactly the same instant (triggered by a radio signal or the audio of a radio signal). A person on the deep playa would likely hear three but at least two chirps arriving a different times. These chirps might be emitted at two minute intervals. A person on the deep playa would then begin to walk toward the LAST or LATEST arriving chirp that they hear. This will walk them toward the reference point. When all three chirps arrive at the same moment, they are at the reference point but they will likely see other landmarks before they get that close. The idea is for people on the deep playa who might be disoriented as to direction (maybe it is night and there is no moon reference) to be able to walk their way in and off the playa in prolonged extreme conditions.

If the three chirps are of slightly different pitch, a person could even tell where they are in reference to the point if they knew how the pitch of the individual emitters are arranged but that is beyond the scope of this example. A fog horn at the man might do the same in giving a reference but the idea is to provide a means of allowing people to navigate their way off the playa if extreme conditions were forecast to persist for a period of time longer than people might be expected to hunker down out on the open playa.